Methodology · Demand & Market Layer v1.0

How the demand layer is built

What it is, what it is not, and how to trust the numbers. Version v2.137.33

The one-sentence honest version: this layer is a sourced synthesis of public market data — every figure traces to a named primary source with a vintage — and it is deliberately not a proprietary forward-curve or bottom-up demand model. It tells a development-finance reader which commodity sectors the public evidence says to lean into, hold, or avoid; it does not claim to forecast prices.

The three-state rule, applied to demand

The platform's governing quality standard carries directly into demand. Every demand, supply-balance and price figure is one of:

Sourced a named primary source states the figure (e.g. IEA's ~30% projected copper supply shortfall by 2035; the World Gold Council's 2025 central-bank tonnage).
Derived synthesised to a transparent standard from sourced inputs (e.g. a "direction" call inferred from a cited deficit projection).
Absent no clean primary figure is held this pass — marked, never invented. A fabricated demand forecast is treated as a more serious error than an honest gap, because it is the harder one to catch downstream.

Sources

The layer is grounded in named public primary sources, including:

IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 — demand growth and supply-balance projections for copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and rare earths (STEPS/APS/NZE scenarios).
World Gold Council (Gold Demand Trends Q1 2026 + Outlook) — central-bank and investment demand.
World Bank Commodity Markets Outlook (Oct 2025) — precious metals, silver, fertilizer/potash price paths.
Company & group filings — De Beers / Anglo American 2025–26 production reports and results for diamonds.
Named industry market reports — potash/SOP segment growth and price context.

What each field means

Direction — the structural market call carried from the cited source (structural-deficit, balanced, oversupplied, structural-decline), not Afrimintel's own forecast.
Security of supply — links each commodity to the ownership/control intelligence in the deposit dossiers (the 17E layer). This is the dimension Western development-finance institutions increasingly weight above headline price, and it is where the platform's ownership work and demand work reinforce each other.
DFI lens — the synthesised decision implication for a development-finance audience. A judgement, labelled as such, built on the sourced fields above.

Known limits (stated, not hidden)

This is public-source synthesis, not a proprietary model. A bottom-up demand model with proprietary forward curves would be a deeper instrument; this layer is the honest public-data floor beneath that.
Price context is point-in-time and vintage-stamped; it is not a live tick. The live pricing path is the price deck / commodities layer.
Co-product commodities (e.g. silver at a copper mine) are shown for completeness but the primary commodity drives the asset-level demand thesis in the Decision Lens.

Cross-references: demand & market outlook surface · DFI Decision Lens (Q6) · demand.json feed